I'm wondering if it's my personal issue or do others experience the same thing?


If I load a project and work on it for a while, everything behaves normally. If I get up and leave it idol for a while, the usual things happen like screen saver, etc. The visual side of things comes right back with mouse or keyboard activity. The issue is if I choose to either play or record, there may be a full minute's worth of wait-time before it starts. It appears to be either a power-saving type of thing for disk inactivity or maybe a buffering thing on the Sonar side.

I've looked at all of the Windows power settings, and I don't see anything that would contribute. Does anybody else experience this? Does anybody have a suggestion for other areas to investigate?

Thanks in advance.


I'm running X2a on Win 7-64.
1-Disk (C:) is dedicated to OS and Sonar executable.
2-Disks (RAID 0) are dedicated to WaveData.
It is a DAW-only machine with nothing else installed.
Power settings are set to "High Performance."
Hard Disk is set to turn off after 60 minutes.

Don't turn off the hard drive after 60 minutes. 

You also don't want the computer going into sleep mode either. Set that to never. 

Not sure, but a common idea is to disable screen saver for DAW usage, at the very least.

In the Power settings, I always change to 'Never' for putting computer & screen to sleep.

There are some other tips for optimizing computers for DAW use. 

There is one for sure on the Presonus site - [my 2ndary DAW]. 

It is done by a very knowledgeable guy - user-name - Monolithent.

Worth a read for sure.

Other wise, Google it.

I've been wondering the same.  Does not seem to take as long as a minute as in your case,  but definitely a while before things start to work again.

I updated from Vista to Windows 7.  I am pretty sure i have no power management things on. Never had this issue with Vista.    

Not a real problem,  just a little annoyance.

Thanks both of you guys. I don't have an option to disable the Hard Drive shutoff; however, I set it to 999 minutes. Do you have the option to disable completely?

Thanks again.

Set the value to zero. That will set the "turn off hard drive after" setting to never.

... I don't have an option to disable the Hard Drive shutoff...


I don't have or even know about that option. But I wouldn't shut your Hard Drive off - ever! 


It may not recover and/or wake up.


In fact 'Windows Wake Up from sleep function' has always been a bit buggy, so I never use it.


We may or may not be talking about the same thing, but I'm now thinking that could be the problem.


Can you say a bit more about disabling the Hard Drive? And what you do with it.  

You also want to set the disable inactive USB devices off.  It's in Power Settings, I believe under advanced.

Bob Bone

Thanks everyone who chimed in.

Wetting the value to zero and changing the USB settings fixed the issue!

Personally, I don't mind waiting a minute or so for Windows/everything else to come back online after powering down due to inactivity. Why wear your equipment out doing nothing ?

My only problem waking up was with my Creative card often not coming back to life, but a recent driver update seems to have fixed that, so now my sytem can go to sleep and wake up no problem (my Mackie interface and the onboard sound never had problems).

If I were recording, I'd definitely keep the system going full blast.